However, before I place an online order, there is always a doubt in the back of my mind, “What if it doesn’t fit into my environment?” For product functions and quality in general, I can examine the extensive consumer reviews, ratings and answers, which can typically provide a convincing gauge. But my environment is specific to me. General reviews cannot help much. This is why many online shoppers buy a product online, only to find it doesn’t fit into their kitchen, and then have to return it. From the seller’s point of view, a manufacturer or a distributor sells a product online, only to find it returned later. Think about the wasted time, money, and effort along with the unnecessary shipments, risks and disappointments.

To address this issue, Build.com developed a feature called “In-Home Preview (Augmented Reality)” for selected products as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. In-Home Preview (Augmented Reality)

(Video courtesy of Build.com)

According to an article on Digital Commerce 360, Build.com finds AR shoppers spend more and return less. Here are several specific metrics shared in this article:

• AR users on average visitcom’s app or site twice as often each month than non-AR shoppers.
• The average session length for an AR shopper is nearly one minute longer than non-AR shoppers.
• The return rate for AR shoppers is 22% lower than shoppers who didn’t use the tool and bought the same product.
• Therefore, in one year, Build.com increased the AR-enabled products from dozens to 650, or 1,700 SKUs.

In the same light, it’s encouraging to see that SOLIDWORKS Sell develops its own general plug-and-play AR capabilities for 3D online product configurators as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. SOLIDWORKS Sell AR Capabilities for A 3D Chair Online Configurator.

Although different from the Build.com AR application, SOLIDWORKS Sell AR looks pretty friendly to use by consumers and easy to deploy by brands. Let’s find out how it works.

First, load a configurator URL, such as a 3D chair, in a Safari browser on an iPhone, iPad, or iPad Pro with iOS 12 or above. Then customize materials, sizes or shapes across various components to your liking as shown on the left side of Figure 2. By the way, this customization step works in all major browsers, devices and operating systems, but the AR only works in Safari on iOS 12 or above at the time of writing this article.

Once happy with the appearance in the 3D viewport, you can touch the AR button at the upper left corner and it will switch to an AR preview window as shown in Figure 3. Please note that after finishing your tweaking, you may need to wait for several seconds before touching the AR button. This is the time needed for the final personalized model to be rendered accordingly in the AR mode.

Figure 3. An AR preview window of A 3D Chair Online Configurator, powered by SOLIDWORKS Sell.

Now please touch the AR tab at the top of the preview window. You may be asked to move the iPhone and scan the floor to place the chair, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Move iPhone to scan the floor and place the chair.

In several seconds, the chair will pop up in your environment as shown on the right side in Figure 2. For those with experiences in the early days of AR, you may notice that it doesn’t require scanning a QR code or other prerequisite markers any more. This certainly eases the user experience.

In this AR display, you may spin the digital model by rotating two fingers together as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Spin the digital model in the AR mode by rotating two fingers together.

You can also slide one finger on the screen to push it further or pull it closer. Of course, you may go back to the configurator, choose a different appearance and project the updated chair again. For example, Figure 6 shows a different fabric material. Also note that you can scale the model up or down by expanding or pinching two fingers, similar to scaling an image on an iPhone. What’s insightful here is that the display tells the active scale in real time, 100% in this case, so that we know how the actual size would look and fit in the environment.

Figure 6. 100% scale of an updated chair with a new fabric.

That’s it for a consumer to verify the product’s suitability before placing an online order. There are no goggles, glasses, theaters, or any special equipment needed for this experience. All you need is an iPhone, which is why it’s so easy and practical for the general public to adopt.

On the other hand, what does it mean to manufacturers or distributers? Is there any heavy development needed on the seller side? The answer is no—as long as you have 3D online configurators powered by SOLIDWORKS Sell, AR can be enabled with no additional coding, which is why I call it “general plug-and-play AR capabilities.” I know some sellers are ready to get onboard. The next natural question is what are the low-hanging fruits to enable AR first. Build.com shared their experiences:

• “Products that have lower than average conversion online, but convert well at offline retailers.
• Premium products, as expensive items are often a considered purchase. AR could help give the shopper confidence.
• Same for heavy items, such as a bathtub.”

I hope that you are as convinced as I am on the values, potentials, and easy adoptions of AR. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the technologies, but I feel that I will be missing something in my next online purchase without AR. Am I alone?

To learn more about how SOLIDWORKS Sell can help promote your ideas and products, please visit its product page. The best way to learn is to roll up your sleeves and play with live examples featured on a demo site including actual client websites. Have fun and please leave your thoughts below.

About the Author
Oboe Wu is a SOLIDWORKS product manager with 20 years of experience in engineering and software. He is an advocate of model-based enterprise and smart manufacturing.

If you've been in business very long, you've heard this before: The Paperless Society. Today’s working environment, however, is not quite so paperless. Sound like a soapbox? Maybe, but it’s reality. And 2D drawings are also part of reality. But the question is, do they need to be?

Back in the days before 3D modeling, if you wanted to make something, you had to have a drawing. You couldn't just stand behind a machinist and talk him through it. All the arm waving in the world couldn't help. You needed to convey your “master stroke” from one brain to another. For that, you needed a drawing (a picture is worth a thousand words and all that).

If you could precisely capture what you had in your head, other people could understand you. For that, you typically had to hire a person—a draftsman—specially trained in how to document a design in such a way as to make the details clear to anyone looking at the drawing. And those drawings were beautiful! But over time, things got more and more technical. There was sometimes more information than could be adequately included on a drawing. (Not to mention some people who had difficulty interpreting 3D from 2D orthographic projections.) But when surface and solid modeling came on the scene, you had another option.

There’s a reason older technology looks the way it does. It used to be that a highly skilled artisan was necessary to make things. As tools improved, hand crafted gave way to machine-made because it was easier and more economical to get acceptable, repeatable results. With widespread mass production in the latter half of the twentieth century, cost became the driving factor. People didn't want to pay for super high quality when they could get “good enough” cheaper. When machine automation (robots) invaded the factory floor, combining low-cost and reasonable quality became possible. That’s when people started to get serious about design. This is when CAD came into the forefront of design. Designers used computer modeling to create beautiful, organically shaped products that could still be produced economically. They could build a 3D representation of an object and send it directly to a machine to make. When organically shaped models couldn't easily be dimensioned, they invented notes like: REFERENCE COMPUTER MODEL DATA FOR SHAPE DEFINITION.

As anyone who has ever worked with someone else’s models knows, it can be challenging to verify that 3D geometry is current and/or correct. Sure, you can measure most things on the model, but rarely at a glance. Validating a model requires setting up the appropriate measurements, taken from the relevant angles. It can be tedious. And what about information not embedded in the model, such as tolerances or surface finishes? Without a drawing to point out where to apply that texture, you’re left guessing. For instance, how do you specify a grit blast finish on a particular surface, and precisely where the finish begins and ends?

SOLIDWORKS MBD, for model-based definition, lets you specify tolerances, dimensions, surface finishes and even notes, right on the model in 3D space (see Figure 1).It feels a lot like using the measure tool, but permanently displays the results. Back in the late 1980s,this kind of functionality was in SDRC’s I-DEAS CAD software. It was impressive. Now, there are several programs that include this sort of capability. It can be very handy indeed. Will it replace a drawing? Maybe. Up to a point.

Figure 1. In SOLIDWORKS (SW) MBD, all the information you would normally find on a drawing is instead saved on the part. (Image courtesy of SW.)

All this functionality comes at a price. To use MBD effectively,you need the proper software tools. That may not be a problem for a big company like an automaker, but for smaller businesses, it can be a challenge. For instance, even here in 2016, some smaller companies are only now adopting solid modeling for design a good twenty to thirty years after it became available,chiefly because of the cost involved in implementing it. For one, the software isn’t cheap (though there are free modelers out there). As an example, SOLIDWORKS (SW)MBD is currently available as an add-in for $1,995 (plus a $495 subscription), yet still requires a base license of SW purchased separately. Add in the expenses for hardware and training andthe little guy often can’t justify the cost.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a moving image is worth even more. Visualization improved greatly when SW introduced eDrawings (see Figure 2), which provides the ability to rotate a displayed model. You no longer had to guess if a dashed edge shown on the front view meant what you thought it was. You could just rotate the model and see. But did that capability wholly replace the utility of a 2D drawing?

Figure 2. eDrawings offer a clear and easy display of your drawing yet allows you to rotate the model to get a better look at the details.

Regulatory compliance, depending on industry, is often critical for design. In order to ensure compliance with the rules of the industry, regulatory bodies mandate inspection of design data. Design documentation needs to be something tangible that can be controlled, looked over, verified and archived. For example, your incoming inspection department needs to be told what to look for when parts come in for inventory. A drawing is perfect for that. In fact, any department that has to reference your 3D data will need something to reference, and that typically will be a drawing. And SW has a lot of powerful tools for creating industry standard drawings. Once your model is finished, just drag a base view onto your drawing and start dimensioning (see Figure 3). It’s that easy.

Figure 3. Creating a drawing using industry standard practices is very simple with powerful and easy drawing tools.

What if you all you need is a drawing without a 3D model? That happens too. In such a case, DraftSight is a free option;well,at least for individual users. The software costs $299 for businesses wanting more powerful professional tools than the free version offers (which includes the first year of the $99 annual subscription). DraftSight looks and feels very much like AutoCAD,and it allows you to create 2D drawings. The software can also open/import your legacy AutoCAD drawings (or include external references to other drawings).

The world we live in is such a polarizing place. It often demands “this or that” when what we really need is “this and that.” Wisdom would seem to tell us to use the tools that make the most sense—that there is room for both approaches to documentation. Whether it’s 2D or 3D, we have options. Considering the cost of making a mistake, it only makes sense to use the documentation approach most appropriate for the task at hand. The end goal is always the same: Convey important product information as clearly as possible. We can’t afford to ignore good tools. Besides, as long as there are napkin sketches, 2D will never go away.

About the Author

Michael Hudspeth has been a designer for two decades, a lifelong artist, an avid model builder and author (specializing in science fiction). He, his wife, two daughters and one too many cats thrive in the great American heartland, just outside of St. Louis, Missouri.